Lausanne 4 Reflections — Part One: Celebration
This is part one of a three-part series. One global missions leader’s reflection on his Lausanne 4 experience.
Lausanne 4 (L4) concluded on September 28, 2024, and it has taken me at least this long to make sense of what I experienced at the event—both the absolute privilege of being able to participate in such a grand affair and the unease I felt with the implications coming from the Lausanne executive, which I henceforth identify as Lausanne Central.
In a presentation to the Lausanne Freedom and Justice network prior to the fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, I positioned myself cautiously on the “prophetic periphery” of Evangelicalism, but in doing so (with reference to Proverbs 27:1-6) I consider myself a sincere friend, an insider, and not at all a stranger to the faith.
In my September editorial for Christian Daily International I outlined some hopes for Lausanne 4, and these remain relevant alongside my thinking here. I write as a global leader passionately concerned for the well-being and replication of biblically faithful, gospel-centered, maturing, Christ-following Christianity. The kind of Christianity committed to co-creating New Creation as we participate in the purposes of God, communally and individually.
Logistics
L4 attracted almost 5,400 participants from 200 territories and gathered us around 896 discussion tables in the 4,208m2 (45,300ft2) main hall. After the opening night I heard comments that this is the kind of crowd Jesus and the disciples would have fed, with excess left over, from a few loaves and fishes. It was an overwhelming thought.
An additional 2,000 participants joined online from more than 100 countries (just 10 percent of the 20,000 initially projected). The livestream, however, attracted over 30,000 viewers from 161 countries (impressive, but again, far fewer than the hundreds of thousands initially anticipated).
My fellow Kiwi, Andrew Jones led the creation of virtual lounges on spatial.io where online participants could create avatars, explore specially built exotic spaces, and hang out with each other. Apparently, that space was dominated by Brazilians who brought their “alegria de viver” (zest for life) into the virtual realms!
On the visitor’s side of the L4 service team, almost 500 people invested themselves selflessly, often going above and beyond the call. They served alongside more than 1,600 Korean volunteers serving in multiple ways with unrestrained enthusiasm. At last count, 6,888 Koreans also participated in a 24/7 prayer meeting for the gathering in a nearby church.
It is now public knowledge that the official demographic breakdown (according to place of residence) included 25.5% North America, 13.4% East Asia (predominantly from South Korea), 13% Europe, 10.3% South Asia, 10.3% Africa (English, Portuguese, Spanish speaking), 9.6% South East Asia, 7.7% Latin America, 3% Oceania, 2.5% Africa (Francophone), 2% Middle East/North Africa, 1.6% Eurasia, and 1.1% Caribbean.
Between North America, Europe, Oceania, and other expatriates, I’d suggest around 40% of the attendees were Anglo-European and related diaspora. Yet, when one was immersed in the crowd, the event did not feel overwhelmingly Western. The same cannot be said for the official language of the congress, which was English.
The main highlight for me was meeting people I don’t see often or have only collaborated with virtually, as well as people I didn’t even know who took the time to appreciate my work. I know of others who experienced similar, and we were all humbled by it. It is not often that we get confirmation of the reach of our creative contributions towards strengthening participation in the purposes of God in and for the world.
Divine appointments… God certainly answered that prayer.
Prior to the event, I refrained from locking down appointments to meet with people. Instead, my wife and I prayed that the Holy Spirit would generate divine appointments—those spontaneous relationship connections that somehow knit together in God’s purposes for us and the groups we serve.
God certainly answered that prayer. As a result, my contacts database and to-do list has grown significantly larger! I am very thankful for the commitment of the Lausanne Movement to convene occasional large gatherings like L4 for the relationship connections it generates.
Praise too for the L4 program developers who did an excellent job at creating diversity among the speakers on the platform (all of whom were required to speak in English). The overarching narrative, rooted in the book of Acts, allowed for a variety of perspectives to be shared, whether as extended biblical reflections or short, often densely packed, related commentary, or practical instruction.
Lessons
I was blessed by some bold choices in speakers as well as some challenging content that made it through the vetting process. And, if you have been following along, you will be aware that there were some early embarrassing moments for Lausanne Central, as certain influential parties were obviously not used to just sitting in the tensions of difference with lowered defenses, listening to learn and seeking to understand. Perhaps some issues were just too raw.
It is time we restored the lost art of church discussions.
Ironically, the reaction to Dr Ruth Padilla de Borst’s challenging presentation, the only person to seriously tackle contemporary justice issues from the main stage (other than related to persecution), just served to amplify Dr Anne Zaki’s appeal the following day (approved months before hand) that, “It is time we restored the lost art of church discussions, the art of talking and listening to each other, even to those who oppose our views on how to interpret the Bible or how to worship or who should lead in the church or which country to bless and which nation to curse.”
In a globally diverse gathering as large and ambitious as Lausanne 4, misunderstandings, the associated hurts, and the reconciliation process that must follow, should be expected; and, for me, they should be celebrated too. Contentious issues were raised, refuted, reconciled, and publicly discussed in a way that can co-create far better outcomes than each party could have anticipated.
Ruth’s concern for justice and Anne’s appeal for mature Christian dialogue were worked out in real-time, as difficult as the process was for all involved. We shouldn’t manufacture such painful interaction but when it emerges, and if it is well mediated, it can create a healthy buzz and intense unbridled discussion that can have a positive effect long after the rest of the event is forgotten.
Participating in side discussions… changed us. We became emotionally and spiritually engaged in the subject matter.
In spite of the best efforts of the program team, very little of what was said from the stage will likely translate into long-term memory. Those of us who wrestled with Ruth and Anne’s content in the wake of the controversy raised by Lausanne Central’s reactive apology will forever remember it. Participating in side discussions about it changed us. We became emotionally and spiritually engaged in the subject matter.
All the L4 presentations have been recorded for posterity, but they will struggle to find an audience once Lausanne Central (which owns the content by virtue of signed media releases) stops promoting it. Much more might have been retained by participants if Lausanne Central had followed the program team’s request that a minimum of 30 minutes per day was spent in prayer. They didn’t.
Prayer times were cursory at best. Extended times of prayer allow for processing in a sacred space. It helps with digesting information about God and God’s concerns in conversation with God in a shared space. But even brief moments of solemnity lost their potential impact as triumphalistic Christian music of the Western commercialized kind exploded in the air at a volume that sought to raise the dead.
Lausanne Central clearly had less concern for transformative impact or innovative theological engagement about missions than they did for the classic US American pragmatic penchant for getting things done. The very lead-up to the event assumed an immutable foundation of modern Evangelical assumptions that were not permitted to be questioned.
It probably did not occur to Lausanne Central that these assumptions might need to be questioned, deconstructed even, in the hope that we could together co-create concepts of church and mission more biblically faithful and better fit for purpose in our radically changing global contexts. Holding to time-worn assumptions immediately limited what could be achieved with the glorious diversity L4 brought into the room.
In contrast to the transformative lessons the friends of Ruth Padilla de Borst and the adjacently affected Palestinian contingent learned through the apology controversy, and all the other side-conversations we had with friends old and new, Lausanne Central’s idea of a co-creative process was to guide participants through a systematic discussion process focused on their 25 “great commission gaps”.
Every single one of the discussion groups were to follow the same design process. Literally filling in blanks, sheet after sheet, day after day. While the talented and experienced designers built rich relationship building, collaboration, and mutual learning rationale into the process, it was affected by Lausanne Central’s intersecting goal of collecting data and fostering commitment to their digital collaborative system.
Leaders of the discussion groups seemed to struggle to bring the expectations of participants into alignment, leaving a good number of us wondering what the process was about and where it was all leading. From my perspective, ignorant of the expert thinking behind the process, the working group exercise seemed to be a highly industrialized attempt at collecting data step by step to synthesize towards some sort of grand solution. Actually, not so much a solution as a commitment to keep laboring towards “closing the gap”, for as long as it took following the event, on Lausanne’s singular digital system.
The aim was… getting people hooked into the collaborative ecosystem.
On the face of it, in the context of the congress as a whole, the primary aim seemed not to be focused on building long-term relationships with collaborative potential as the designers hoped, but rather getting people hooked into the collaborative ecosystem controlled and leveraged by Lausanne Central. The permanent system of which has yet to be digitally built, at the cost of many more millions of dollars yet to be raised.
The interim system provided at the event repeatedly crashed, leading one leader from the Majority World to comment that the Holy Spirit was once again humbling the grand plans of managerial man. Yet we have confidence that the Holy Spirit was working in spite of the digital frustrations and only time will tell what fruit the new relationships and collaboration training will bear.
As I considered the entire process, I wondered if Lausanne Central had bought into the values of what Susan Cain has dubbed “New Groupthink”, the core axiom of which is “none of us is as smart as all of us”. The trouble with that theory is it has long proven to be ineffective for true innovation. To the contrary, Cain provides compelling evidence that innovation emerges out of isolation. Chris Wright’s work on the Cape Town Commitment is a prime example of this. His inspiration for that document came on the way to John Stott’s writing retreat in Wales. Compared to the revelatory genesis of the Cape Town Commitment for L3, the Seoul Statement reads like the by-product of a focus group looking at issues discerned from data as opposed to the result of inspiration that can guide Evangelicalism into a more fruitful future.
Working groups and so-called innovation labs can be helpful for idea generation, information gathering, or even refining a final product before launch. But, as Susan Cain confirms, the real work of transformative innovation happens in one person’s prayer closet, dark office, back room, garage, or writing retreat before it proceeds to change the world. It is here that major inflection points in world history find their source.
